Friday, September 30, 2011

Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

After reading this hilarious comment on IMDB about the TRAILER for Hellraiser: Revelations I just had to watch one of the old sequels again and my choice fell on the one I’ve seen the least times, Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Now, I’m one of those that don’t consider any movie holy. They could have remade Hellraiser as a romcom for all I care! The original movies still exist and can be enjoyed whenever I want to. Regarding Revelations it’s probably shitty, it’s just a movie that was produced to keep the rights to the franchise and nothing wrong with that. Art is business, make no mistake. I’ve been defending the Hellraiser-sequels since as long as I can remember, and I still will do that. It’s just something with them that attracts me. Like a twilight zone in the Hellraiser-mythology…

Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is now a grown woman and has left her terrible history behind her, living a fantastic life together with her husband Trevor (Dean Winters). A terrible accident kills her and leaves her husband alone in the world with a mind more and more confused for each day. He starts seeing visions and his paranoia starts to grow. The police think he killed Kirsty and his memory-loss gives both him and us some clues of what really happen! Soon his closest friends starts showing up dead, brutally molested and isn’t that a certain Cenobite lurking in the dark of his mind…?

Like the excellent Inferno, and the sequels after, Hellseeker is a typical mindfuck movie. What I heard all these sequels were other movies from the beginning, but was rewritten to be Hellraiser-sequels, which makes them have a distance to the Cenobite-mythology, only using it as a background to some very fucked-up characters. What’s good with them, with the possible exception of Hellworld, is that the originals scripts used are quite good. Not especially original for us who have seen a lot of movies, but more ambitious and dark than most other DTV-sequels out on the street.

But I like them, and Hellseeker - while not in the same league as Inferno – is a fun and nasty sequel, dark and downbeat and even of the character of Kirsty is not that well-written, it’s nice to connect the story back to the original movie. I mean, why not? What gives the Hellraiser-sequels more respect than for example the Children of the Corn-franchise, is that they trying to keep the stories true to the downbeat tradition of the original. Sure, Hellworld is a slasher in (a not convincing) disguise, but the rest are actually quite non-commercial for being cheap sequels produced for the home video market.

There’s not need to complain about Hellseeker, everyone else does it so well. If you can ignore the holy Hellraiser-movie by Clive Barker (and maybe part 2) and just watch it like a separate mindfuck-movie with Pinhead and his friends in cameos, I think much more of you would appreciate what they’re doing here.

If you are true Clive Barker fans, I’m sure you would wait a thousand years for a proper new Hellraiser movie, or…?